The Last King of Erebos

[Ascendancy]

Chapter 9: Within the Four

The bed had been turned down for him three nights running. Each morning the servants found it as they had left it, made it again, and said nothing.

On the third night, in the second hour after midnight, Hades came in and found the corner of the coverlet folded back, square, as it had been the two nights before. He stood looking at it with his coat half off his shoulders.

Then he took the coat the rest of the way off and hung it over the chair at the bedside, near enough to reach. A tunic of fine black linen, unbelted, had been laid out for him on the coverlet. He put it on.

Before he lay down he put his hand inside the coat. Two tablets. He read the first through the firmament, and his attention slid off the reading halfway, and he had to read it again. The fleck under his nephew's name pulled toward Olympus, as it had every night since Corinth, patient as a plumb line. The fleck under his own name lay loose in its lead, like grit.

He put out the lamp.

* * *

The fire was dung and thornwood, and it smoked.

The Titans had pitched their council tent on the high ground above the ford and left its walls rolled up for the air. Hides on poles. A table of split cedar on trestles. Around it stood eleven of them in the old dress: long wool woven in bands of red and ochre, fleeces over the shoulders against the cold of the uplands, gold collars beaten so thin they lifted when the wearer breathed. Their hair was long and bound in spirals of bronze wire, and their beards were oiled and twisted into ringlets, the way his father had worn his at table. They spoke his father's language, and he understood every word. He had last heard it in Tartarus.

On the table lay a calfskin map, with the distances marked in days of riding.

Hades stood inside the firelight at the corner of the table, close enough to read the skin.

He wore what he had worn every night that year: a tunic of undyed wool, a belt of rawhide, leather wrappings bound to the knee. The Helm sat close on his head, dark leather, its cheek-pieces new from the forge and bright as coin. He reached to turn his ring, and his thumb found bare skin.

A Titan with a cup in his hand came around the end of the table and stepped wide of the corner where Hades stood, the way a man steps around a draft, and went on talking. Hades read the map. He knew where each of them would stand before they moved.

Across the fire, someone was looking at him.

He was built like one of their own captains, heavy through the chest and shoulders, in a plain dark cloak with the hood thrown back. The Titans moved around him as they moved around Hades. He looked straight at him.

Hades reached into the ground beneath the tent, to read the man's weight on it and the way he stood, as he would have read any stranger's. The ground did not answer. There was the trodden earth, and the smoke, and the voices over the map, and under all of it nothing he could put his hand into.

He knew then where he was, and what year it was, and that the ford had been dry for longer than Erebos had stood.

He took off the Helm.

The Titans went on with their council. The one with the cup leaned past him to point at the skin, close enough to touch.

”My lord, I have your brother's answer. He slept three nights ago. I've been at your leaf since." Morpheus came around the fire, between two Titans who went on arguing over the map. "I gave him your words as you sent them. That the weapon in Caria was a Lyterion. That the one surrendered after the war was melted, and this one has been made since." He paused. "He gave me his answer and told me to give it to you in his face. I said I would carry it as he said it. Nothing added."

"Give it to me."

Morpheus inclined his head.

The weight came off him first. The heavy chest and shoulders thinned and drew out, and the man grew longer in the limb and narrower at the waist, until what stood there was hard and spare, every muscle lying close along the bone, the build of someone who had never once had to carry anything he did not choose to. The hair came down past his shoulders in loose waves, chestnut, lighter at the ends where the sun had been in it. The beard came in close and neat. The eyes cleared to that pale color between grey and hazel. Then the ivory tunic, and the deep blue mantle worked with gold, and the eagle at the shoulder, and rings on four fingers.

He stood among the fleeces and the bronze wire like a guest at the wrong feast, and was entirely at ease.

Zeus looked at him with that whole, warm attention that made a person feel like the only one in the room.

"Mortals do not make such things. They find them. I am seeing to the finders." A small movement of the hand, the one with the most rings. "Hephaestus tells me his doors have never been better kept."

Then he came forward and embraced him.

It was exact. The weight of the arm across his back. The other hand at the nape of his neck. The smell of wine and sun came into the smoke of the tent. Hades's arms rose and returned it, from long habit, before he had decided anything.

Zeus stepped away to examine him, exactly as he had in the doorway on Olympus, the day Hades came to ask him about the Atharim. He was smiling.

The smile went first. Then the tunic, and the rings, and the chestnut hair. The shoulders broadened and the chest filled out, and the dark cloak came back last, its hood still thrown back. Morpheus put his hands behind his back.

"He made me give it back to him. All of it."

For one word the voice was Zeus's again, with all the warmth gone out of it.

"Again."

Then it was Morpheus's own.

"That is everything, my lord."

Hades looked down at the map. The distances were still marked in days.

"You have done more than you were asked."

Morpheus turned and walked out past the tent poles, into the dark beyond the fire, and was gone.

Hades woke.

Hephaestus tells me his doors have never been better kept.

Kept with wards. He had written it himself, in this room, with Thanatos standing by the door: the wards on the workshop should be drawn close. And below the fourth weapon in the war inventory, in a clerk's cramped hand: Within the four, nothing woven holds.

He dressed in the dark. Coat off the chair, arms into it, the tablets heavy against his ribs. He pinned the key by touch on the way to the door, and was in the corridor with the last button still undone.

* * *

The Sovereign's Pyle stood in its own court beside the palace, two pylons of black stone with plain faces. The guards saw who came and stood aside.

He drew Dynamis into the pylons in the pattern they kept for three men, and the stone knew his hand. Pale light spread between them, and he went through.

On Olympus the sun was already high.

The receiving hall beside Zeus's palace had been built to be crossed by a king: marble floor, gilded columns figured with victories, sunlight falling through it from end to end. The heat met Hades on the threshold and soaked into the black wool of his coat.

A chamberlain was crossing the hall with an arm full of papyrus rolls. He looked up as the light faded between the pylons, saw who had come through them, and bowed so low that the rolls slid, and stayed bent until the king had passed.

Palace doors stood open on empty rooms. On the terrace where his brother had poured for him, the low table was still laid: an amphora on its side, two cups, a dish of figs gone soft and split in the sun. A servant at the far end of the colonnade saw the black coat and went the other way.

Beyond the palace lay the Propylaia: a long square open to the sky, ringed by pylons gilded and figured as everything here was, one pair for every court and sanctuary Zeus thought worth reaching. Most stood dark. One was awake.

Its pylons were carved with double axes, and at their capitals stood his brother as the Carians carved him, bearded, with the axe on his shoulder. Labraunda, Zeus's own sanctuary in the hills of Caria.

Through it lay a hillside in morning light. Terraces of olives stepped down toward a valley. A small town stood on the lower slope behind a wall of grey stone, the kind of town that kept one temple and one well. Smoke went up from it in five or six columns, straight in the still air, and leaned together higher up into one.

A minor god came through the conjunction while Hades watched, carrying something in both arms. It was wrapped in a blue temple curtain and was half the length of a man. One corner of the curtain had slipped. Underneath was a painted wooden face, very old, the paint worn to the grain on the cheeks where hands had touched it for generations. Apollo. The god carried the statue carefully across the court and through an arch, and the town's smoke came off his clothes as he passed.

The god holding the conjunction leaned on the left pylon with one hand flat on the stone, the way a man holds a door open for whoever is coming. Hades knew him. Whenever Zeus sat enthroned, at a feast or a judgment, this one stood at his right shoulder, and his sister at the left. He was Styx's son. He had his mother's habit of looking only at what he needed to, and he kept his eyes on the hillside.

My children live beside Zeus. Is Olympus safe for them?

The conjunction had stood open since before Hades entered the Propylaia. It stood open while he crossed it. Anyone in that olive grove with an instrument in their hand could have measured it from end to end, and walked through behind it.

The town had been sentenced without a hearing.

It was his brother's affair. He went out by the western side, and down.

* * *

The sentinels stood at the head of the workshop passage. Their hollow gazes turned to him, and they stepped aside, as obedient as before.

At the neighboring entrance, where mortal craftsmen had shown their seals, a chain of new bronze hung across the way.

The air below smelled of cold metal.

The great hall was lit by the panels in the ceiling and the drawings glowing on their sheets of glass. Over the empty benches the rings turned about their sphere of silver light, slowly. The suspended mechanisms hung where they had last been sent. The golden attendants stood among the worktables in the postures they had stopped in, one with its hands raised to a shelf, one turned half toward the passage. They were waiting for their next instruction.

His heels were the only sound in the hall.

In the laboratory the worktables stood around the raised platform, and on the platform the golden eagle sat on its marble perch with its wings half open. The apprentices' stools had been pushed back from it. On the table beside the empty chair, five golden feathers lay in a row, where his nephew had set them down the day he looked up and said Uncle.

The eagle turned its head and watched him come in. Its polished eyes followed him across the floor, as they had followed the apprentices. When he stopped, it stopped.

He put his hand inside his coat, took out his nephew's tablet, and read the fleck.

It lay loose in its lead.

The eagle's head came round fast to follow him. He was across the laboratory and into the passage, the tablet still in his hand.

* * *

Twenty paces down the passage, the strips of baetylus that lit the walls went grey, as if burned to ash. The line curved across the floor and up both walls and closed overhead.

He stepped across it, into the ring.

Beyond, the only light came low and yellow from ahead: a wick.

He stopped in the doorway.

The mark beside the door, which had brightened under his nephew's staff, was the same grey as the strips in the passage. Inside, the shelves that rose and fell at a touch had come to rest wherever the field had caught them. One hung halfway down the wall, its instruments tilted on it. The worktable beside the chair stood at the height it had last been set for. The bronze sphere sat on its stand in two open halves, dark.

The only thing in the room that moved was a flame.

The lamp was clay, the kind mortals buy by the dozen. Someone had filled it and set it on the floor at the foot of the worktable. Someone sat on the floor beside it. A man stood at the far wall.

Hades looked at the wards first.

Three housings, his nephew's own design, on the jambs and the lintel of the door. They had been laid in close to the frame on every side, as tight as their limits allowed, exactly as he had written. All grey.

The holes were in the floor. There were four, at the corners of a ring that took in the chair and most of the room and the first stretch of the passage. Each was the width of two fingers, bored clean into the mountain's rock, and deep. He crouched beside the nearest and laid his fingertips on its lip.

The stone remembered the iron: a banded stake driven down by a mallet in a man's hands, struck many times, without hurry. The sleeve of stone at its foot had ground against the rock with every blow, and when the stake was wrenched out again it had left its grains along the sides of the hole, grey and dead. It was his. It had come out of the lower galleries at Aleyonian Lake, from the seam where the gallery opened into the fissure. Every load that left that seam had gone out under his seal, to whatever forge could pay for it, long before he had issued the order that no more baetylus leave the kingdom.

He rose.

The tray was on the side table, where he had left it: shallow, lined with cloth. In it lay the instrument from the Nekromanteion in its pieces, the mismatched housings, the scratched cover, the needle. Beside them lay the two components his nephew had set side by side the day he showed them to him, the altered ward and the intact one.

Hades picked up the intact ward.

It had been made to stop a working that failed, before the failure could do harm, and it stopped it by putting the working out entirely. Eupalamos had cut away the stopping and taught the ward to watch. Someone had taken the stopping instead, and made it larger, and driven it into the earth on four stakes, so that it put out every working inside the ring at once: every ward, every light, every god's mageia.

He laid it back in the tray, beside its twin.

The staff stood against the wall by the door, upright and neat, the way a guest's stick is put away.

They had laid Hephaestus out on his own long worktable, and laid him out properly. His eyes were closed. A strip of linen bound his jaw, knotted at the crown of his head beneath the fair hair, darker at the roots as it had always been. His hands lay one over the other on the breast of his crimson tunic, below the clasp of his own making. Under them the cloth was darker, and stiff. Someone had straightened the folds around his legs, the lame one and the sound one, so that they lay alike.

On his lips there was a coin, the mortal fare for the ferryman.

The jaw had settled under the linen since it was laid, and the coin had slid toward the corner of his mouth, askew.

Hades set it straight with one finger.

Then he looked at the woman beside the lamp.

She was sitting on the floor.